A major difficulty in offices of businesses around the world is keeping track of the huge volumes of information that are produced each day. Typically, information fails into one of two basic categories. Information is either disposable immediately after creation or is required to be retained for some period of time after creation. Information that is to be retained is saved in a variety of manners known in the art. In fact, saving information has been made so easy that even information that is not necessary to be kept more than a short period of time ends up being saved much longer than necessary. The end result is that databases are typically full of unnecessary saved information.
A variety of methods have been adopted by businesses to deal with the problem of huge amounts of saved data. One method has been simply to add additional memory. When additional memory is cheap, this is a reasonable quick fix. Nonetheless, this “solution” simply postpones the day when the user must deal with an overloaded database full of ancient unneeded data.
Inevitably, a user is confronted with the reality that the only accurate way to deal with a database full of ancient data is to review each of the entries individually and determine which is to be kept and which is to be deleted. Understandably, this is not a task most individuals look forward to completing. As a result, it is often left undone to the detriment of the overall performance of the database and associated machinery.
It is typical that offices have more than one business machine involved in handling data. In fact, in today's environment, businesses usually have a network of multifunctional peripherals (MFPs). These machines, as the name suggests, are capable of accomplishing more than one business task. For example, these machines serve as printers, copiers, and the like, all of which are essentially fully functional computer systems and all of which include databases of one sort or another. As these machines continue to become more fully integrated with each other by means of intra and internets, the problem of data base overcrowding has mushroomed.
Further, job retention is a known printer feature that allows a user to store a print job at the printer either in memory or on a disk. Jobs can be reviewed and printed using the user interface at the printer control panel. Job retention types currently known are: Stored Job, Private Job, Quick Copy and Proof and Hold. Some of these known job retention types are stored until they are manually deleted, as discussed above, at the control panel and others are automatically deleted after they have been retrieved and printed, so that a user must take extraordinary steps to retain a job in the database for future use.
Thus, there is a need in the art for providing an apparatus and method that enables a user to control stored jobs in a manner that is easy, efficient and timely such that jobs that need to be retained are retained and those that need to be deleted are deleted at a time selected by the user.